


Parasite

by Fierceawakening



Category: Transformers: Prime
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-27
Updated: 2018-09-27
Packaged: 2019-07-18 07:29:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 787
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16113716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fierceawakening/pseuds/Fierceawakening
Summary: I've long headcanoned that Megatron thinks the Matrix is a parasite that turned Orion against him. What if it actually was?





	Parasite

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MlleMusketeer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MlleMusketeer/gifts).



Megatron stood over his fallen foe.

He cycled air through his intakes, harsh and rough. His frame felt heavy. Every part of his frame ached. He wondered, dully, if he might fall, then ground his fangs together and forced himself up again.

Beneath him, Optimus Prime lay still.

“Dead?” he snarled, knowing his enemy wasn’t, not yet, and then said nothing more because he had no retort. Not for this.

_This is what I wanted._

But the thought didn’t come with triumph, or relief, or vindication. He could sense those emotions, coiled somewhere in his spark.

First there was something he must do.

He knelt down by Optimus’s inert frame, glad he and his nemesis had been alone at the end, glad for the rough and rocky ground digging into the seams of the armor at his knees.

The strike that had finally felled Optimus Prime had scored his chest, shattering his window glass and tearing through the thick, red-painted armor beneath.

The Dark Star Saber had bitten deep, deep enough to pierce the walls of Optimus’s spark chamber itself. The dark energon of the blade had corroded the edges of the wound, and Megatron could see light in the gap.

 _Sparklight,_ he thought.

Then he growled. That wasn’t sparklight at all.

He shuddered and leaned over Optimus’s inert frame. Optimus’s optics flickered, but Megatron ignored it. He couldn’t let himself get distracted now, and he’d done dirtier work. He dug his claws into the wound and pulled.

Optimus’s optics flared blue. His mouth plates moved, the rest of his frame still, more like a lifeless computer than a sentient machine. 

Megatron grunted and twisted the wound open. Blue light nearly blinded him. 

“What are you doing to us?” Optimus’s voice said, stilted and emotionless. 

“I’m getting rid of you,” Megatron snarled. He wiped energon and oil stained fingers on his own thighs as best he could, and then reached down into the hole, his movements deliberate and careful. The light from Optimus’s spark was dimming fast, but afterimages danced in Megatron’s vision. If his claws pierced the spark he’d exposed, his nemesis would die too soon. 

His fingers closed over something thin and delicate, the metal hot from its proximity to Optimus’s spark. 

“You’re hurting us.” 

“Good.” Megatron tightened his grip on the small object. 

“What are you doing?” Optimus made a face, a horrible rictus, a facsimile of pain. 

“Getting you out of him. You call yourself the Matrix of Leadership—“

“We grant wisdom.”

Megatron’s frame rumbled, his engines revving in rage. “You are a parasite. You change mechs into someone they are not.”

He yanked at the tiny thing, but it wouldn’t budge, as if magnetically attached to Optimus’s spark. Megatron grunted with effort and pulled.

“Wait.”

“No.”

“You separated us before. He forgot everything.”

Megatron winced.

“If you do it again, he will not understand.”

Megatron’s own spark pulsed with dread. The last time he’d yanked the Matrix out of Optimus he’d forgotten the millennia he’d spent with the Matrix fused to his spark. Remembered nothing of the long eons of war, seen Megatron only as a friend.

If he awoke mortally wounded, with Megatron’s claws shoved in his wound...

“He will know that you betrayed us.”

 _I did not. But I have no time to argue with the likes of you._ “So be it, then.”

With a mighty roar, he wrenched it free.

Optimus’s optics flared a sick, overcharged blue. He screamed—a real scream—and then  his optics dimmed again, to the half-lit glow of a dying mech.

“Meg—“ he began. 

Megatron froze. Would his old enemy and older friend call him by the name he used now, or the longer name pulled from the depths of his memory? 

“Megatron,” he said, his voice a dimming mist of static.

“You know me,” Megatron said. “You know why—“ He held up the Matrix in the cage of his clawed fingers. 

“That wasn’t me. That was… us.” 

Megatron tightened his grip. The thing seared him and its edges dug into his fingers. He felt his own energon drip from the joints. 

“I do not regret it,” Optimus said. “I do not think the Matrix was entirely wrong about you, old friend.” 

Megatron lowered his head. “I know that, too.”

“Then why do you take it from me?” 

Optimus’s spark brightened. Megatron pulled his hand free, knowing what that portended. A strong spark would glow fierce and bright, sometimes, before it guttered out.

Optimus’s optics dimmed with it. He said nothing more.

“So you could die as yourself,” Megatron rumbled, “whether enemy or friend.”

He let a handful of thin, twisted metal fall from his open hand, stood, and walked away without looking back.


End file.
